Sex and sexuality on the edge of bedlam

FIFTY SOMETHING:I was in a bar in historic Salisbury, not far from heathen Stonehenge, a number of years ago. It was the tail-end of a Saturday night and there was a bunch of us hunched over a ring-stained table, our tongues like sandpaper. We’d come from a preview of a play we were working on: four writers, two actors, the director, a couple of bearded techies.

We were a bit wrecked from long nights slaving over hot typewriters, throwing empty styrofoam cups at each other, and hanging out in the auditorium with our feet up on empty seats, watching the lighting guys tumble up and down ladders. Theatre can be such taxing work.

It seemed like a lively bar and, though there would be rewrites to do in the morning, fingers that had stiffened over the keyboard had no problem wrapping themselves around pint glasses. And so there we were. The play was about sex, about coupledom and monogamy, about infidelity and disappointment, about how loyalty can strain under the weight of casual opportunity.

It was a devised piece, and the four writers, of whom I was one, shared our invented characters in an artily promiscuous way, and the project was stimulating and engaging (although possibly more so for the participants than the audience).

Anyway, we were licking up the froth in the noisy bar in our rectangular spectacles and polo-necked sweaters and military boots, and throwing around phrases like “upping the ante” and “gilding the lily”, when I became aware of a hush and then a kind of collective feral growl.

There was a table nearby, and gathered around its perimeter was a bunch of ogling blokes. On top of the table, dancing, trance-like, in cheap platform shoes, was a yellow-haired girl with her knickers in her fist.

I don’t remember how the scene dissolved, whether she got down again or put her underwear back on, or whether the barman cleared the snarling deck of blokes. I do remember her face though. She looked like a big cardboard dolly I used to play with when I was a child. You could move the dolly’s blue eyes back and forth and up and down by adjusting a little cardboard tab on the back of her paper head, but no matter which way she glanced, the expression remained the same: lifeless, glassy, detached.

Presumably, she was somebody’s daughter or lover or friend. She was in the bar with mates; she wasn’t the hired entertainment. I don’t know why she chose to dance on the table without underwear; I don’t know if she was coerced. I don’t know if she was happy or sad or desperate or proud or just absolutely plastered. Presumably she woke up the next morning and put the kettle on, and searched through her dressing-gown pockets for a packet of fags or a painkiller. Maybe later she caught the bus to her auntie’s for her Sunday lunch.